Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Getting in the last post of 2014. This is a piece I wrote about going to a Hong Kong protest in early October. I wrote it a while ago and it's been up for a couple of weeks on http://www.diretorio.net.br/?p=51

When I stepped out of the Times Square subway
station on Wednesday, October 1st, I couldn’t help sizing up the
Chinese-looking people around me. That young couple cutting through the crowd,
are they going to the demonstration? That middle-aged man with the
mixed-looking child, is he? Some people had umbrellas on a clear night. They
were easy to tell. Others were harder. Everyone walked intently, furious with
purpose—but this was New York, they might just be going home to watch Modern
Family. The tourists, of course, milled around like they were at the beach,
creating small hurdles all over the sidewalk. I wove through, unmindful of
them.

As a Tibetan exile, I had heard too much
from China-watchers about the bourgeois selfishness of the Chinese middle
class, the Chinese youth. Now, hot on the heels of the Sunflower movement in
Taiwan, the Umbrella revolution had sprung up in Hong Kong. For me, the night
had an air of unreality. I was going to take part in the rally for Hong Kong,
to stand in solidarity with the brave men and women of Hong Kong who were not
afraid to say: we want real democracy. They spoke for Hong Kong but they knew that
it was not just Zhongnanhai who was listening but all of China.

Once I arrived at the rally, which was about two
hundred people strong, I could tell the people around me were new to protest.
There were all kinds of people but the majority were young people in their
twenties, mostly from Hong Kong, some from China. One guy spent ten minutes on
the phone describing his location to a friend before giving up. My brother and
friends were in the crowd too but I knew I wouldn’t find them until the rally
was over. One of the organizers walked through the crowd, telling them that
they were supposed to repeat the slogans. The slogans were mainly in Cantonese
but sometimes in English. Hong Kong, Be Strong! Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong
Kong! Freedom, Freedom, Freedom! The crowd slowly picked up its cues,
jelling together into a cohesive whole when we started singing Do You Hear
The People Sing, one of the Umbrella Revolution’s theme songs:

Do
you hear the people sing?

Singing a
song of angry men?

It is the
music of a people

Who will
not be slaves again!

Will you
join in our crusade?

Who will
be strong and stand with me?

Beyond the
barricade

Is there a
world you long to see?

Then join
in the fight

That will
give you the right to be free!

Now phrases from the speaker in the center were
reaching us. Members of the crowd roared approval now and then. The girl next
to me whispered to her boyfriend, “I am not comfortable saying it’s a
revolution.” I understood what she was saying, and wondered when she would
realize how wrong she was. As Yang Jianli, who was at Tiananmen in ’89 and
lived through the massacre, said at a similar rally in DC, “I was in Tiananmen.
And I experienced the massacre. I understand very well that the Chinese
government still has the capacity and maybe the intention to violently resolve
any dispute and suppress dissent.” For such a government, a government that
rules without the will of the people, by force, any such public dissent is
revolution. A rumble of snow rolling down a mountaintop may not have any grand
designs, but sometimes it can turn into an avalanche.

I have a quote on my desk by the thirteenth
century Tibetan scholar and politician Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyaltsen. He said,
“All freedom is happiness, all oppression is suffering.” As someone born in a
refugee community and brought up in exile, someone who grew up hearing about
people with names like mine who were imprisoned or tortured for speaking up, a
non-citizen of the world until I became a Tibetan American, I know this. I know
this intimately. I put up this quote not to remind but to reassure myself. It
was only a matter of time before the Chinese people asserted their right to
live with freedom and dignity.

What will happen in Hong Kong? Who can say in
the near future? In the long run though, we know. The battles will be fought
out but the war was won long ago, in Athens, when the people got together and
decided that representative democracy was the future of human government.